A stroll down memory lane … ahhh, nostalgia

One of my favorite teachers growing up was a nun with a mustache, Sister Janice (ju-neese’), who I had in fifth and sixth grade. I probably did not learn anything worthwhile. By that time I knew how to read and cipher, so school was just repetition and testing. I do remember her, standing by the window overlooking First Second Avenue South in Billings as she talked about the death of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations on September 18th of 1961, the day before. Sr. Janice, of course, thought that it was the International Communist Conspiracy that killed him, and we kids were brought up in that paranoid circus, so we thought that too. She spoke with gloom abut the world we were going to inherit.

Dag HammarskjoldIt would be years before I came to learn that Hammarskjold had been gunned down by our old buddies in the CIA, who had not too long before that also murdered Patrice Lumumba. In the coming months CIA would also dispatch Ecuadorian President Jose Velasco and General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

The theme behind the murders was the dominant propaganda meme of the time, that they were communists. The real reason for their deaths was that in the wake of World War II, with Britain and France greatly weakened, former resource colonies were breaking free of chains and charting independence courses for themselves. The CIA, Capitalism’s Invisible Army, was appointed the new keeper of order and was in brush fire mode.

The murders served both to get rid of pesky democratic forces, but also to warn all others in the colonial world that a new sheriff was on the beat. Any who got in the way of American corporations’ access to local resources would encounter assassins, marines, fighter jets and thugs parading as American elected officials.

LBJ pointing at his …surgical scar.One such thug was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a crude and coarse man who once, when asked why we were in Vietnam, took out his dick and shook it at reporters saying “This is why.” Johnson was a murderer, but only a local thug. Many have inferred that his crimes in Texas suggest he had a role in the assassination of President Kennedy, but he was, in my view, merely controllable due to his corruption, much like Harry Truman. Those who wheeled him into the Vice Presidency, and ultimately presidency, knew he could be easily managed due to his past. His rightful place was in prison, or passing into the netherworld in a Texas gas chamber. He was that corrupt.

That’s just how it works – to the naive it appears that men and women arise from the grassroots and run for office and get elected and do the people’s business. There are indeed many people like that, but they don’t often get elected. They are not corruptible. One key to getting elected is a skeleton in the closet, a lever by which a person can be controlled. Ashley Dupré, used to honey trap Elliot Spitzer

Side note: Often enough, if a good lever does not exist, it can be supplied. For instance, the amazingly beautiful woman who did business with Elliot Spritzer and brought him down as governor of New York was part of a honey trap, a common ploy used to compromise troublesome officials. Please ask yourself, gentlemen, what you would do if this woman stumbled into your lap.

Many people know about Bobby Baker. He was a scandalous Washington, DC figure in the early 1960’s who ran a club where powerful people could engage in trysts and enjoy some protection. The Kennedy boys were clients, and JFK’s famous dalliance with an East German spy, Ellen Rometsch originated there. But Baker had many irons in the fire, and was tied to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and so JFK had decided that in the 1964 election, Johnson would be dropped in favor of North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford.

That’s all filthy, but not unusual. Anywhere there is power, there is corruption, hookers, drugs, bag men and assassins. Johnson’s favorite assassin was guy named Mac Wallace. One witness has placed Wallace in a certain book depository on 11/22/63, but that’s more a rewriting of history, as CIA is anxious to do anything to deflect blame from itself in that murder. So there’s a school of thought that traces the JFK murder to LBJ, but it falls apart on close examination. Johnson was not powerful enough to orchestrate an event of that magnitude.

But Mac Wallace was a busy man.

Another friend of LBJ’s was Billy Sol Estes, who was doing a sale/leaseback scam for fertilizer storage tanks in West Texas. It sounds mundane, but there were 33,000 of them and it was a multi-million dollar enterprise. Following the money led back to a man in the Agriculture Department, Henry Marshall, who was tied to LBJ.

Billy Sol EstesLBJ ordered Marshall’s death – “get rid of him.” A man resembling Mac Wallace asked direction to Marshall’s home one day, and thereafter Marshall was bound with a plastic bag over his head and a hose running from an exhaust pipe, and was plugged with five bullet wounds. It was very clumsy. His body was moved to a nearby farm, and when the five bullets holes were tied to a shotgun found nearby, it was ruled a suicide. I guess it makes perfect sense in Texas.

In the succeeding months thereafter, George Kritilek (carbon monoxide), Harold Eugene Orr (ditto), Howard Pratt (need you ask?) and Coleman Wade (small plane crash – gotcha!) all turned up dead, and all ties between Billy Sol Estates and LBJ were severed. Billy Sol testified to all of this in 1984, after LBJ was dead, naming LBJ as a participant.

That’s your country, folks, just a small slice of real history. A thief and murderer sat in the White House for four years, in real life a man who should have been sitting in prison. Had he waved his dick at anyone there, it would have been severed.

I’m beginning to wonder if some of us here today weren’t actually around in medieval times. Watching the legislature is perhaps an expression of nostalgia for those good old days. According to new science, nostalgia counteracts loneliness, boredom and anxiety — making life seem more meaningful … Other theories welcome.